Some considerable time ago – it was, I discover to my surprise, April 2010 – I was lucky enough to participate in the Great Crocodilian Dissection Event at the RVC (Royal Veterinary College, UK), planned by the mighty and benevolent Prof John Hutchinson. John actually received a job-lot of numerous crocodilian specimens and arranged to [...]

It’s well known that monitor lizards (or varanids) sometimes practise cannibalism (that is, predation within their own species), and it should be no surprise to learn that big monitor species sometimes (or even often) prey on and eat smaller ones. The phenomenon whereby predators predate on other, typically smaller, predators is termed intraguild predation, and [...]

Like modern birds, and like their close relatives among the theropod dinosaurs, the birds of the Mesozoic Era laid eggs and, we reasonably infer, made nests. But what else do we know about reproductive behaviour in Mesozoic birds? Essentially, we know very little, and by “very little” I actually mean “just about nothing”. A new [...]

Matt Wedel kindly passed on the photos you see here. They show the Man-eater of Mfuwe, an enormous male lion Panthera leo that terrorised the small town of Mfuwe (and the surrounds) in the Luangwa River Valley of eastern Zambia. The photos were taken in Chicago’s Field Museum where the specimen has been on display [...]

The complex structure, development and growth of feathers can, to paraphrase one expert on the subject, be seriously damaging to your mental health. Feathers are just crazy, almost certainly the most complex structures to ever grow out of any animal’s external surface. Yet for all their marvellous complexity, for all the interest that people have [...]

The Gila monster Heloderma suspectum and its close relative the Mexican Beaded lizard H. horridum are the only two extant members of Helodermatidae, the gila monster clade.  It’s been agreed for a considerable time that, among living lizards, helodermatids are most closely related to monitor lizards (varanids) and to the weird Bornean earless monitor Lanthanotus [...]

After a number of unplanned distractions (involving the story behind the Archaeopteryx forgery claim, the time-honoured tradition that is April 1st, feathered tyrannosaurs, horned dinosaurs, chickens, ‘Cadborosaurus’, Eld’s deer, and intraguild predation in, and the phylogeny of, raptors), it’s time to get back on track and carry on looking at tubenose seabirds, and petrels in [...]

Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a female Northern (or Eurasian) sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus and male Common kestrel Falco tinnunculus, photographed together after (it seems) the hawk grabbed the kestrel as a potential prey item. The photo was taken by John Sykes in the Wick Fields area near Christchurch, Dorset, UK, and has been featured [...]

Tet Zoo ver 3 – the Sci Am incarnation of this august and influential institution – has now been going for about 10 months, and a moderately respectable 78 articles have appeared on the blog so far (excluding this one). The vast majority have been lengthy, referenced, heavily illustrated articles – no brief, picture-of-the-day-style contributions [...]

This is Eld’s deer Cervus eldi* or the Brow-antlered deer, Thamin or Tamin, a moderately obscure, CITES-listed Old World deer discovered (by Lt. Percy Eld) in India in 1839. It was later found to occur in fragmented populations across much of south-east Asia and also in southern China. Fossils are known from Java and it [...]